The doctor loved Archie with the love of an older brother; not altogether because he was Jane’s ward, but for the boy’s own qualities—­for his courage, for his laugh—­particularly for his buoyancy.  Often, as he looked into the lad’s eyes brimming with fun, he would wish that he himself had been born with the same kind of temperament.  Then again the boy satisfied to a certain extent the longing in his heart for home, wife, and child—­a void which he knew now would never be filled.  Fate had decreed that he and the woman he loved should live apart—­with this he must be content.  Not that his disappointments had soured him; only that this ever-present sorrow had added to the cares of his life, and in later years had taken much of the spring and joyousness out of him.  This drew him all the closer to Archie, and the lad soon became his constant companion; sitting beside him in his gig, waiting for him at the doors of the fishermen’s huts, or in the cabins of the poor on the outskirts of Barnegat and Warehold.

“There goes Doctor John of Barnegat and his curly-head,” the neighbors would say; “when ye see one ye see t’other.”

Newcomers in Barnegat and Warehold thought Archie was his son, and would talk to the doctor about him: 

“Fine lad you got, doctor—­don’t look a bit like you, but maybe he will when he gets his growth.”  At which the doctor would laugh and pat the boy’s head.

During all these years Lucy’s letters came but seldom.  When they did arrive, most of them were filled with elaborate excuses for her prolonged stay.  The money, she wrote, which Jane had sent her from time to time was ample for her needs; she was making many valuable friends, and she could not see how she could return until the following spring—­ a spring which never came.  In no one of them had she ever answered Jane’s letter about Bart’s death, except to acknowledge its receipt.  Nor, strange to say, had she ever expressed any love for Archie.  Jane’s letters were always filled with the child’s doings; his illnesses and recoveries; but whenever Lucy mentioned his name, which was seldom, she invariably referred to him as “your little ward” or “your baby,” evidently intending to wipe that part of her life completely out.  Neither did she make any comment on the child’s christening—­a ceremony which took place in the church, Pastor Dellenbaugh officiating—­except to write that perhaps one name was as good as another, and that she hoped he would not disgrace it when he grew up.

These things, however, made but little impression on Jane.  She never lost faith in her sister, and never gave up hope that one day they would all three be reunited; how or where she could not tell or foresee, but in some way by which Lucy would know and love her son for himself alone, and the two live together ever after—­his parentage always a secret.  When Lucy once looked into her boy’s face she was convinced she would love and cling to him.  This was her constant prayer.